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Helping Your Kids Cope with Children's Food Allergies |
 You may remember that first moment when it dawned on you that you had an allergy problem. It is a sobering moment especially when part of that realization is the adjustment you had to make to the idea of having that allergy forever. While there are occasions where people grow out of allergy or the severity of the problem subsides, most of us have to accept that if we have an allergy now, it will be around for a long time to come. And that change to how you see your health picture brings with it some changes to your lifestyle and some of those changes can be dramatic.
But adults have the maturity and the ability to see things in the big picture that allows us to cope with that realization. We may not like the fact that we cannot eat certain foods or we can't have a pet or we have to live without other things in life because of our allergy problem. But we get used to the idea. But when there are children's food allergies in the home, helping your youngsters adjust to that idea can be very difficult.
Of course, you can introduce the idea of a children's food allergy to your son or daughter at the point where the symptoms surface. When your child experiences the unpleasant symptoms of a food allergy, they often think they are quite ill and they just want mom and dad to make it go away. When the symptoms of the food allergy do not go away, it is easy for a child to come to an incorrect conclusion that they have a dread disease or that somehow they are being poisoned.
This is where the ability of mom and dad to educate the child into the nature of a food allergy is important. It is a challenge try to illustrate to a child that his or her immune system is attacking foods that are otherwise perfectly good foods and that it is their immune system that is making them sick. The child may wish to declare that the food that is making them sick is evil and that nobody should eat it. But then if they see friends or their brothers and sisters enjoying that food, they will get confused again.
It will take patience to help the child understand. Of course the first step is for mom and dad to understand the nature of their children's food allergies as well. If the child is becoming ill from their food allergies and you don’t know whether the allergen is milk, eggs, peanuts or some other food type, it is hard to give the child good counsel of the changes to his or her diet that will be necessary to live with a children's food allergy.
But there is one concept that will help a child accept that they cannot have certain foods because of his or her children's food allergy. That concept is substitution. A good example is candy. If candy is setting of a children's food allergy symptom, before you ban candy entirely, consider that the allergic reaction your youngster is going through may be the result of allergy to peanuts, to the high fructose corn syrup or to the milk products that are part of the candy.
If you already knew you child was allergic to dairy, you can take the time to learn what candies do not use milk products at all. Then when you can come home with candy that you know is safe for the child to eat, you can feel good that you found a way for your little one to enjoy one of the fun parts of growing up. Above all, when your child can have some candy just like the other kids, they will not feel singled out or "weird" to their friends.
As adults, we can understand allergies and become informed on what to expect. It is comfort to parents that children's food allergies often do not continue when the child grows into adolescence and then on into adulthood. Children have trouble looking very far into the future so this assurance may not be of great comfort to a young child who is coping with food allergies.
But a child can understand the idea of, "don’t eat that because it makes you sick" and they will respond to a substitution food that they enjoy just as much. And if that gets your little girl or boy through those tough years of dealing with their children's food allergies until their immune systems get mastery over those allergies, then those techniques are justified.
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